Combinatorial restrictions across lexical categories: CP and DP-complementation

Abstract

Attitude verbs like know, believe, surprise, fear differ in their combinatorial restrictions, e.g. "Jo knows that/whether we won" vs. "Jo believes that/*whether we won". Previous work attributes such differences to semantic properties associated with these verbs. Results from emotive nominalizations present a challenge for such meaning-based explanations, and show that the combinatorial restrictions of attitude predicates arise in a complex interplay of semantic and morpho-syntactic factors.